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Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions »

Book cover image of Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions by Ra'anan S. Bouston

Authors: Ra'anan S. Bouston (Editor), Annette Yoshiko Reed (Editor), Annette Yoshiko Reed
ISBN-13: 9780521831024, ISBN-10: 0521831024
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date Published: October 2004
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: Ra'anan S. Bouston

Ra'anan S. Boustan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. A scholar of early Jewish mysticism, relations between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the history of the Jews in the Second Temple Period, he has published studies on early Jewish mystical poetry and the role of gender and sexuality within Hellenistic Jewish thought, among other topics.

Annette Yoshiko Reed is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. She has contributed to the Journal of Biblical Literature, Vigiliae Christianae, and Jewish Studies Quarterly, and is co-editor of The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

Book Synopsis

Maps the patterns of unity and diversity within the religious landscape of Late Antiquity.

Table of Contents

Introduction : "in Heaven as it is on Earth"1
1The bridge and the ladder : narrow passages in late antique visions19
2"Heavenly steps" : Manilius 4.119-121 and its background34
3Heavenly ascent, angelic descent, and the transmission of knowledge in 1 Enoch 6-1647
4"Connecting Heaven and Earth" : the function of the hymns in Revelation 4-567
5Working overtime in the afterlife; or, no rest for the virtuous85
6Earthly sacrifice and heavenly incense : the law of the priesthood in Aramaic Levi and Jubilees103
7Who's on the throne? : revelation in the long year123
8The earthly monastery and the transformation of the heavenly city in late antique Egypt142
9Contextualizing Heaven in third-century North Africa159
10Bringing the heavenly academy down to earth : approaches to the imagery of divine pedagogy in the East Syrian tradition174
11Angels in the architecture : temple art and the poetics of praise in the Songs of the Sabbath sacrifice195
12The collapse of celestial and chthonic realms in a late antique "Apollonian invocation" (PGM 1262-347)213
13In Heaven as it is in Hell : the cosmology of Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit233
14The faces of the moon : cosmology, genesis, and the Mithras liturgy275
15"O paradoxical fusion!" : Gregory of Nazianzus on baptism and cosmology (Orations 38-40)296

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